Category: House stuff

Finally got around to replacing the wax ring on the toilet this week. Simple enough job.

Unfortunately once I got everything back together and tested, the toilet was still leaking. The wax ring seemed to be sealing everything up just fine. Finally with a little more investigating I discovered the culprit: a tiny 5 mm long crack at the base just outside the wax ring.

I wasn’t able to get a very close look at it without dumping the remaining water out of the bowl, but it looked like it may have been a manufacturing defect.

So I guess it’s off to Lowe’s sometime this week to shop around for another toilet. We’d been meaning to upgrade the toilets anyway…just not quite so soon.

Managed to catch this critter uprooting a trail in our front lawn today. For such a little bug, it created a pretty large trail.

Probably explains all the tunneling and loose dirt we’ve got in the back yard too. The wife is on a mission to eradicate them now.

So what does one do with spent fire extinguishers?

I’ve got a small extinguisher for the kitchen, and a medium sized one for the garage that are both sitting at empty. The garage one just seems to have depressurized over time. The kitchen one I had to use to put out a small fire in the oven that started up from stuff spilling over.

The kitchen one says “Discard/Replace extinguisher if pointer reads empty” on the pressure gauge. The label also says “Must be discarded” in tiny bold letters (it’s a small label), so I take this to mean that this particular extinguisher can’t be recharged. So what’s the proper way to dispose of one of these? It’s probably still got chemicals in it, so I’m hesitant to just toss it in the trash. Plus it’s made of metal, so it could probably be recycled.

The pressure gauge needle on the garage one is sitting in the Recharge zone, and says “MUST BE RECHARGED” in slightly larger bold letters, so I assume this particular one can be recharged. I figure I can probably find a place in the phone book that does fire extinguisher service.

I should make a trip to the fire station down the road. I bet they can tell me what to do.

Finally starting to see the end of the latest garage project. I’ve just about finished creating all the shelves and hangers we need (for now). They all fit on the rails and nothing’s come unglued (yet). All I need to do now is put a couple coats of polyurethane on the shelves to make them look nice. Then we just need to arrange them so we can pull the car into the garage without smacking into anything.

So where does one go to get sandbags? And where do you go to fill them up without raiding sand from the beach?

The wife is worried about the garage getting wet with water by Ernesto. When there’s big rain, a little water sometimes makes it past the garage door seal into the garage. Nothing that doesn’t dry up in a few hours though. She likes to be conservative and on the safe side so now I’m looking for sandbags.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I think I can solve the garage water problem if I just angle the eavestrough downspout away from the house a little more. That reminds me, I should probably get up there and make sure the eavestroughs are clear before all the rain starts.

Update: Postscript’s Stormwatch blog provided me with the answer.

City of Charleston fire department has sandbags if you need them